Inspired by @wazzappp 's 'Everyone is Infected' au, and their FANTASTIC art of a mutated Claire Redfield. Set during Revelations 2, beginning right after Claire's story and kicking off Barry's.
I haven't shared my writing on here in a While so this might be a little inconconsistent in pace and/or tone, but I otherwise feel pretty good about it.
The Traveler asked, "He doesn't know his own sentence?"
The Officer replied, "It would be useless to give him that information. He experiences it on his own body."
- In The Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
She’d washed up on the shore of an Estonian coastal town, salt-raw and nearly dead, her only distinguishing feature being the blood-red halo of sodden hair around her ruined face. The coast guard had found her, then reported it to animal control, who had then reported it to the police, who wanted to get the national guard involved.
It had been a minor miracle that, at the time, a certain Jill Valentine had broken out of hospital after rumours of her long-time partner said he’d gone missing in nearby Edonia, and so she’d intercepted the messages and passed them on quick enough that the BSAA had arrived on the scene before anyone else could catch wind of it. And since Valentine was ostensibly on the loose, there were plenty of BSAA patrols in the area on the lookout for reports of lone B.O.W.s.
The fact that she was human - that she could talk - was a subject of hushed whispers and mad speculation among the team that had recovered her, who had also picked up an unapologetic Jill Valentine along the way. In the transport vehicle they’d been separated into their own containment units, but after Jill’s loud and pointed citations of BSAA prisoner and B.O.W containment guidelines, they had been given some tentative medical treatment.
“Jill,” she had said, fighting painkillers and exhaustion and her own twisted body, unable to see her but hearing her every word, her every breath with perfect clarity.
“Yeah, that’s me. My name’s Jill Valentine, BSAA.” She was sat across from her, with two armed guards. Nowhere near enough. She frowned. “I think I’m still on the team. They’ve just had me locked up, since-”
“Chris rescued you,” She’d had to choose her words carefully, talking without lips. “Thro’n Wesker.”
“Fr-” Jill had frozen at that. “From Wesker. You know Chris?”
“Yeah,” Claire had mumbled. “He’s ry ‘rother.”
Claire couldn’t see how Jill’s eyes had widened, but she could hear the hitch of her breath. And she could hear how the BSAA response team had all gotten really quiet, in order to eavesdrop.
“Claire?” Jill’s voice was barely a whisper, but Claire heard it clear as crystal.
“Yeah, it’s ne.” she shifted slowly, so as not to alarm the medic attempting to swab her tendril sheathe. She knew where Jill was, even if her body was also quite different these days - and her eyes were still where they were supposed to be. Probably. “How are you?”
“I’m… not great.” Jill had instantly admitted. “But god, damn is it good to see you. Things are looking up.” She shrugged. “Relatively speaking. At least you’re alive.”
“Thinally caught up thith you and Leon,” she had tried to joke. Jill had given her the decency of laughing. Just a little. Her throat made a trilling sound.
“It’s a glamorous life. Our boy’s a trendsetter.”
“I’d like to see hin,” Claire had mused. “At suhn thoint.”
“Yeah, he can give you some tips on,” Jill gestured. The subtle twitch of her blade was enough to startle one of the guards, so she stopped. “That.”
“It’s not all thad,” Claire had tried a smile, then thought better of it. Not with these teeth. “I can’t see, thut I can hear really well. Also,” she nodded at the outstretched limb twice the length of her body. “Cool tentacle arng.”
“Yeah, you must be a real hit with the ladies,”
“Ne’rer had any conklaints.”
One of Jill’s guards had laughed at that, and despite herself, the medic smiled.
~
Naturally, she had been under tight surveillance for a few months.
There had been a few unofficial speech-training sessions with Leon (on first seeing her again, he had just held her. Him with his black carapace and segmented whiplike tail, her with her skinless corded muscle and prehensile wrist-tentacle. Both carrying the sentence of Raccoon City on their bodies.) during which he’d given her a few tips. Most consonants were possible to her, now, except for B and P - the plosives that needed flesh lips to sound right. She just had to steer clear of saying things like “Backpacking in Budapest.”
Unlike Leon, she hadn’t mutated a pair of mandibles to cover her massive, razor-sharp teeth, so she had taken to wearing a facemask that hooked over the only part of her body that had been unaltered, but internally improved - her ears. Her hair had, at some point, taken on a darker tone all by itself, as close to blood-red as you could get without just bathing in the stuff. Not that she could see what colour it was - but Rebecca had crooned over it, how surprisingly soft yet strong it felt, like a kevlar shroud.
She actually quite liked having big, sharp claws - especially since she could file them down to a more manageable length with which to actually use her hands, without losing the ability to tear through steel with her fingers. Her core, stomach, and thighs had remained largely the same, if slightly elongated and fleshy-looking, and while her feet were definitely bigger thanks to the claws, she could wear specially-fitted shoes without ripping them apart by accident.
The biggest change had been her new tongue.
Well, it wasn’t quite a tongue - it wasn’t in her mouth unless she put it there on purpose, for one thing. Tentacle was more accurate, though it didn’t have any suckers - tendril was the most fitting, but it didn’t really capture the sheer size of the damn thing. She still wasn’t quite sure how it worked, and wasn’t sure if she wanted to know, but as best she could tell, it was essentially a very long tongue without tastebuds that she could retract into a sheath that coiled around her arm from her back, and opened up at her left wrist. It had some sharp bladelike bones on the tip, but she could dip them in so the end of the appendage wasn’t immediately lethal. She could use it like an arm, could shoot it forward like a fist, she could use the blades on the end to slice through things, she could even grab people and lift them in the air with it.
Everything a Licker could do with its tongue, she could do with her… whip?
“Yeah,” was the idle musing muffled under her black facemask, as she inspected the weird tip of the limb and its oddly precise blades on the end. “Whip works.”
“What’s that?” the captain of the two-man crew called over his shoulder. Of course, Barry had been the one to break her out, and together they’d chartered a small motorboat and followed the trail back to Sein Island. “You say something, Claire?”
“I’m calling it my whip,” she managed to answer over the churning of the waves and the grumbling of the engine. She retracted the whip fully into its sheath. It still felt kind of weird. “Not my tongue.”
“Right,” to his credit, Barry had taken the whole ‘Monster Claire’ thing in stride - it helped that he had something else to focus on, after all. “You’ve already got one.”
“Yeah.”
“Remind me,” he all but shouted, toeing the line between asserting himself over the ambient ocean noise and not blowing out her eardrums. “Did anything like this happen to Moira?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she then amended with, “I didn’t s- uh, hear her turn into a giant plant or anything like that. I just…”
She trailed off. “You just what?”
She just turned into a monster on the inside, too. “Claire?”
She just left his daughter to die.
“Claire,” Barry warned, and she startled at the realisation she’d said that last thought out loud. “Don’t think like that. We’ve all made mistakes and hard choices.” It didn’t quite sound like he was reassuring her, so much as reminding himself. “You’re here now, to make it right.”
“Right,” she echoed after a moment.
To fill the silence, Barry declared, “She’s alive, I’m sure of it.” He sounded a lot surer about it than Claire felt, but she wasn’t about to tell him that.
After a few minutes, Claire got up from her seat to turn on the receiver. Her hands had almost doubled in size, but luckily that just meant they were about the same size as Chris’s now. Not that she’d seen him. She sighed at the thought of him, still missing somewhere in rural Edonia, and not for the first time wondered if she should have joined Jill and Piers in their search.
But then Barry would be doing this alone, and she couldn’t in good conscience let him do that when she was the reason Moira hadn’t made it home in the first place.
The radio crackled for another few minutes, until finally it started picking up a looping signal. A familiar one.
“...e have these, these fucked-up bracelets and some crazy woman is talking to us! Some kind of monsters have… killed the others… Please, send help! PLEASE!”
“That’s her!” Barry’s head whipped round. “We got a lock?”
“On it,” Claire knelt down and fiddled with the controls, then cross-referenced it with the satellite navigation tool they had.
Or, she would have, if she could see what was on the fucking screen.
Hanging her head in defeat, Claire groaned. “Barry, I… I can’t see.”
“What?” he looked round again, and after a moment the confusion gave way to embarrassment. “Oh. Right, I forgot. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Here, you take the helm,” he left one hand on the wheel as he stepped away from it. “Just hold her steady, not asking the blind to lead the blind.” He considered it. “Again.”
Claire snorted. “Yeah, right. On it for real, this time.”
It wasn’t too hard to stay their course, although a part of her wished she could remove the front windshield so she could actually ‘see’ the open water ahead of them. As it was, she might as well have been facing a brick wall. Behind her, Barry fiddled with the receiver some more until the signal came through fully. Another minute or so, and he shouted in triumph.
“We got it?” she called back.
“We’re in business.” He was back at the cabin. “If you could adjust our heading-”
She interrupted him with a droll look and a quirked eyebrow, and he barked once with mirth.
“Sorry, couldn’t resist. Lemme take over.” She gave him the wheel, and sauntered back to the deck to give their equipment another look. Feel. Whatever.
She’d struggled with guns lately, thanks to the acute sense of hearing, so Barry had acquired a pair of submachine guns with internal suppressors - MP5SDs, her brain helpfully supplied - as well as a silencer for his Samurai Edge. She’d also picked up a pump-action sawn-off shotgun for herself, needing the wide spread for any quick shots at point blank. The shotgun and Barry’s beloved magnum did not come with silencers, so they were being relegated to “last resort” status. She’d volunteered to carry some more ammunition for him, since she was more than strong enough these days to lug around the extra weight without much trouble. Barry had been sceptical, but then she’d picked him up with one hand and propped him on her shoulder, and that had been enough to convince him.
She hadn’t said it, because she didn’t want to sound cocky, but Claire was pretty sure they didn’t need any of it. Her teeth, claws, and whip were more than enough to get them through whatever would be left of the monsters on the island. But it never hurt to be extra prepared.
